One of the biggest revelations from the Final Fantasy XV Master Version footage that was shown in the wake of the game's delay was the inclusion of a cold open sequence, in which a smexy bearded Noctis battled it out against a mysterious fiery monster. Clearly, Noctis and company have been on the road for some time by the point where this occurs, and director Hajime Tabata clarified some of the details surrounding Chapter 0 in a discussion with IGN.

It turns out that Beard Noctis (tm) is the result of a ten-year timeskip within the game. Noctis will age from his twenty-year-old self at the beginning of the game once a certain point in the story is reached. "The whole change in Noctis' appearance from when the game starts compared to when years have passed so that people would feel the passing of time, and that they were actual living, breathing characters rather than just symbolic characters," Tabata explained. "There's not a deep reason as to why we made it ten years. It's just that we needed a significant amount of time to have passed within the game for certain reasons." This certainly goes hand-in-hand with the recent news that Final Fantasy XV's second half would be paced differently than the first half.

Tabata also included some more specific details about the game's opening. "In the opening sequence, you see Regis and Noctis talking to one another and Regis tells him to stand tall. His appearance later on in the game communicates that he has taken that to heart and lived with those final words."

Final Fantasy XV will be coming to PS4 and XB1 on November 29th. Stay tuned to RPGFan for further details.